


Day 4

by nebulouskisses



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Cancer, Diary/Journal, Emetophobia, Gen, Hospitalization, Sickfic, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29491074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulouskisses/pseuds/nebulouskisses
Summary: After his therapist suggests it might help sort out his thoughts, Yamaguchi attempts to write a journal entry.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Day 4

Dear diary,

Is it cliché to start off a journal entry with “dear diary”? I’ve never written one before, so I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to do it. Am I supposed to start with an introduction? Hi diary, I’m Yamaguchi Tadashi. I’m 15 years old. I’m a first-year at Karasuno High School. I am—was? a member of the school’s volleyball team. And, oh yeah, I have fucking cancer. I don’t know why I wrote that. It’s not like anyone’s going to read this. 

It’s 3:47 in the morning and I can’t sleep. A nurse woke me up to get my vital signs a few minutes ago. I always wake up when they’re trying to get my blood pressure because it squeezes my arm so tight. It’s not like I have been sleeping great anyway though. This hospital bed isn’t remotely comfortable and it’s hard to fall asleep when I hear my mom snoring. She doesn’t snore that loudly, but I’m irritable and I think I’m overly sensitive to it. People keep coming in every few hours. How is anyone supposed to heal in a hospital when no one lets you sleep?

A therapist came in and talked to me earlier today. I guess it was yesterday at this point. Her name’s Ito-san. She looked like she was probably about my mom’s age and she had these huge circle glasses that didn’t fit her face very well. She wanted to know how I was doing and how I was adjusting to being in the hospital. At first, I kind of thought it was a joke. I’m obviously not doing great. I’m in the fucking hospital. And I have cancer. I’m getting irritated again just thinking about it. I know she was just trying to do her job. We talked for a little bit, but I felt like I couldn’t really say what was on my mind. I mean, it’s already hard talking to a stranger, but my mom was in the room, and my mom’s been very on edge. I couldn't get many words in even if I wanted to because of how much my mom was talking. Ito-san told me before she left that journaling might help me figure out how to express what I’m feeling, so I guess I’ll give it a try. I don't really have anything better to do. 

I’m mad. Like really, really, mad. But I can’t figure out what exactly I’m mad at. The world? Myself? The doctors? My mom? I don’t know. I’m just mad. I’m going to have to miss the interhigh tournament because of this. It’s not like it’s going to make much of a difference. I’m the only first-year who won’t end up playing, and even if I did, it’s not like I would stay on the court very long or score us many points. I’m mediocre at best, and that’s being generous. It makes me so mad that everyone else can still play right now and I can't. My high school volleyball career is over before it really got started. I’ve never gotten to play an official high school game and I probably never will. I hate everything about this. I wonder if the team’s even noticed I’m gone.

Logically I know that they know that I’m gone. I mean there are only twelve of us. It’d be pretty easy to see if one of us was missing. And they’ve been blowing up my phone for the past few days. My doctor called my mom last Friday and told her that I needed to go to the emergency room right away because my bloodwork came back “very concerning”. She pulled me out of school around lunchtime. Tsukki was the only one on the team who saw me leave school, but I didn’t tell him where I was headed because I didn't know until after I left. I haven’t been able to leave the hospital since I got here. The doctors and nurses say it's too dangerous, and that I could "decline" very quickly at this stage. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I don't think that going home for a few hours would kill me. I’ve been admitted for six days total. Or I guess seven now since it’s after midnight. I don’t know. But everyone’s been texting me a lot since then. They probably just want to know where I’m at and if I’m doing okay. I don’t know how to tell them I’m not. 

Everything has happened so fast. I haven’t felt great the past few weeks, but I haven’t necessarily felt bad. I had to go to the doctor for a routine physical but my doctor seemed really concerned with how bruised I was. I mean, yeah, I have a lot of bruises. Everyone on the team does. Coach Ukai has been working us pretty hard practicing our receives so my forearms look awful. I still have some bruises on my elbows and knees even though I’ve been wearing my elbow and knee pads every time I practice. It still didn’t seem like it was something to worry about though. I’m achy all the time, but again, I figured it was because I play volleyball. Why wouldn’t I be achy? Any time I told my mom that my legs hurt she would tell me I’m just having growing pains. I had just grown three centimeters the last time I checked. I get a lot of headaches too, and I’m tired all the time. I thought it was just because I was working extra hard between school and volleyball. This year my classes don’t feel that much harder compared to last year, but I definitely have more work to do. It’s annoying trying to keep up with all of it and with volleyball at the same time. 

After I got to the emergency room it took a couple hours for me to get moved to a long-term room. My mom was talking to the doctors for what felt like forever and I started getting really freaked out from it. I have never been to the hospital before this, and they left me alone in there. When my mom came back it was pretty obvious that she had been crying. She’s always been bad at hiding when she cries. She didn’t tell me what was going on right away and just told me that the doctors wanted to do more tests and that I had to stay in the hospital for it. Now that I’m thinking about it again, I’m really upset she didn’t just tell me what was going on then. I’m not stupid. The fact that she was crying while I was in the emergency room was obviously a bad sign. The fact that my new room was literally on the hospital’s cancer floor was an even worse sign. Maybe my mom thought I wouldn’t notice. I don’t know how though. There’re signs posted everywhere. 

The day after that I was pretty busy. There was a nurse who came in pretty often. She took my vital signs every few hours and was drawing a ton of my blood. It made me queasy. My arms look like a mess. I mean they already looked like a mess from volleyball, but so far, they have been stuck five times because the nurses kept missing my veins (and one time the IV that I had just went bad). That day my mom talked to a lot of different doctors outside my room. I had all kinds of tests run on me. Someone came and checked my vision, and someone else checked my hearing. Another person had me do all these exhausting tests to see how well my heart and lungs functioned. Nobody said why I needed all these tests. I got super anxious from it. The day after that, really early in the morning, I had to go to a different part of the hospital for a procedure. Nobody told me what it was until after I woke up from anesthesia. Once I got back to my room I had one of the worst headaches of my life and my hip was super sore. And I had a new IV. This one’s special though because the end of it apparently goes right up to my heart. I’m pretty sure it’s called a PICC, but I can’t remember what it stands for off the top of my head. At least they won't have to keep sticking me anymore. 

A couple of doctors came in to talk to me and my mom that night and that’s when they finally told me that I have leukemia. They said that my bones were so full of cancer cells that they were spilling out into my bloodstream, and they confirmed it when they took a sample of my bone marrow from my pelvis. Apparently, I’m lucky because when they checked the fluid in my spine they couldn’t find any cancer cells there—but they still gave me a dose of chemo in my cerebrospinal fluid just in case I did. I cannot believe they gave me chemo without actually telling me that I have fucking cancer first. I’m still really upset and angry about it. And I’m really scared. I can’t bring myself to look up more about leukemia in general right now. I want to, but the thought of learning more about it makes me so anxious I feel like my heart’s going to explode. 

I haven’t told anyone what’s going on. Everyone’s been blowing up my phone but I start feeling panicky when I think about looking at their messages. I don’t know what all they know. I don’t know if my mom told the team. I’m going to be really upset if she told them I was in the hospital though. I don’t know what she told the school. I’ve always had pretty good attendance up until now. I’m assuming Takeda-sensei knows something’s up, which means Coach Ukai probably knows too. I have missed calls and voicemails from them both, but I can’t bring myself to listen to them. 

Tsukki’s been texting me a lot too. He normally doesn’t text me first, and I feel bad that I’m ignoring him. It’s not like I’m only ignoring him… I’m ignoring the whole team. I feel like a fucking coward. My mom keeps telling me how brave I am because of how I’m handling this, but I don’t know how she came to that conclusion. I’m too much of a coward to talk to my best friend. I want to tell him that I’m here but I don’t know what to say. How will he respond? Will he still want to be friends with me? If I asked him that he would probably say that that’s a stupid thing to say. It’s not like I know what to do in this situation. I’ve never known anyone my age with cancer. I feel like I’m just going to hold him back, and I feel guilty that I want him to come visit me. He’d probably have to miss practice for that. He acts like he doesn’t like it and that it’s such a chore to be there, but I know he secretly likes volleyball. 

I really want to go home. I was supposed to have a sleepover with Tsukki over the weekend and we were going to work on my Minecraft farm. I want to curl up in my bed and have him talk to me. I don’t care what he talks about. He’s pretty good at distracting me when I’m feeling anxious. Maybe he’ll tell me some dinosaur facts or update me about what’s been going on at school. I’ve been neglecting all the homework that’s been sent to me—maybe he can help me catch up. As long as he talks about anything but cancer. I don’t want to talk about that. 

The room I’m staying in is nice. I used to always picture hospitals as super white, no color, sterile places with no signs of life, but this floor seems pretty lively by comparison. Most of the walls are a warm beige color but there are lots of accent walls that are red and green and blue. My room has my hospital bed and a small couch by the window that pulls out into a bed for my mom to sleep on. I have my own bathroom with a shower. There’s a TV across from my bed and a ton of drawers for me to put my clothes in. I didn’t know that I’d actually be able to wear my own clothes instead of a hospital gown. I’m glad my aunt dropped some off for me—it helps me feel a little more normal. They do make me wear these ridiculous yellow socks though and I hate the way that they feel. They’re kind of scratchy and they have these nonslip parts to the bottom that I can feel when I walk. It’s annoying. Anyway. Ueda-san – who is apparently my social worker – brought a GameStation 3 and a bunch of games to play the last time he came to visit. He said it belonged to the hospital, but that I could use it as long as I’m here. I’m not very good at video games, but it’s nice to have something to do. 

There is a large whiteboard on the door to my bathroom that has my name and the date on it and a whole lot of information about the treatment I’m supposed to get. Right now they have “Day 4 of 28” written on the board, and below that, the dates that I’ll be getting chemo. Today, when it becomes Day 5, I’m supposed to get some chemo called pegaspargase. My nurse told me it’s a shot. I’m so sick of being stuck with needles. I don’t know why I assumed that I would get chemo every day, but that’s not the case. It looks like after the first seven days I’ll start getting it only one day a week. And then on day 29 they’re going to check my bone marrow to see if the chemo did anything. My main oncologist said that the goal for my first 28 days of treatment is to go into remission—meaning they can’t detect any more cancer in my bone marrow— and that all the treatment that I would get after that would ideally keep me in remission because if even a single cancer cell is left behind it can take over again. I can’t believe I’ve only been getting chemo for four days. It feels like it’s been way longer than that. 

I’m sick of looking at that whiteboard. Every time I look over from the TV, I am reminded of everything all over again when I see the treatment plan. I want to erase it. I don’t see why I can’t. My mom’s got it written down in a notebook. She’s writing everything down. Like seriously, everything. All the foods I eat, what time the nurses come in, how many milliliters I piss and when, every medication I’ve gotten and every side effect it could possibly have… I’m pretty sure I looked at her wrong this evening and she made a note of it. It’s annoying the hell out of me. I feel like the biggest asshole in the world because it annoys me. She’s just worried. Don’t get me wrong, I love my mom. I love her so much and she does everything she can to keep me happy and healthy. I’m very grateful she’s here with me. But she hasn’t left the hospital once. She’s allowed to use my bathroom and she can order food directly to my room, so there’s really no reason why she has to leave. I want her to leave but I don’t want to be alone either. It's hard sharing a room with her right now when I've lived my whole life being able to go to my bedroom when I needed space to recharge. I feel like I have to stay strong for her because I hate seeing her cry, but she’s been crying every day anyway. I don’t want to make things worse for her. I just want to be able to cry in my room without her seeing me. She hasn’t even let me take a shower on my own since I’ve been here because she’s too anxious that I’m going to fall or get the dressing on my PICC wet. I’m 15. It’s really embarrassing to have my mom in the bathroom with me when I try to shower. Like really, really embarrassing. 

So far, the side effects haven’t been too bad. I got some blood transfusions and that actually helped improve my energy a lot. I have so many cancer cells that they were taking up space where my normal healthy cells should be, and I didn’t have enough blood to carry oxygen throughout my body. I've noticed extra strands of my hair on my pillowcase when I get up to go to the bathroom. I’m not ready to lose my hair. The only time I got really sick was right after I got chemo injected into my spine. I spent the first two days with my head over a bucket because I couldn’t stop puking. My doctor told me that nausea is really common with cytarabine—I only know how to spell that because it’s on the whiteboard still. The nurse gave me some IV medicines that helped with it a little bit, but I kept getting worked up thinking that I was going to puke again and then I would puke because I was panicking. But that's gone away for the most part. I'm still kind of nauseous, but it's tolerable now. Oh- one of the other chemo drugs that they gave me turned my pee red. That was weird. I freaked out when I first saw it because I thought I was bleeding, but the drug just stained my body fluids. I’ll take weird pee over puking any day. I’m also getting steroids until the end of day 14, which my doctor said would probably mess with my mood. I’m going to blame my anger and general moodiness on that. I know it’s not all the meds though.

I’m not completely stuck in my hospital bedroom. I’m allowed to wander the floor. Apparently, it’s encouraged that I walk the hallways so that my muscles don’t get super deconditioned from lying in bed all day. I’ve been walking a lot just to feel productive. The more I lay around the more anxious I get. There’s a lot of artwork on the walls out in the hallway. From what I can tell from the labels, they were made by previous patients. I hope those patients are alive and doing well. Some of the pictures are pretty good. There’s an activity room with a huge library of DVDs and video games and a ton of toys for kids who are younger than me. Yesterday I was walking the hallway and I saw some little kids painting with a volunteer and who I assume were the kids parents. They were so young. Maybe three or four. They looked really sick, with their bald little heads and extra pale bruised skin, but they still looked happy. One of the girls was wearing a princess dress and kept twirling around getting paint everywhere. She kept getting tangled up in her IV line, so the volunteer had to keep spinning her IV pole around her. I’m pretty sure the kid thought it was a game because the more flustered the volunteer got the more she did it. At least she was able to laugh about it. I saw a mom holding her baby while walking around the unit when I was heading back to my room. Like an actual baby. How fucked up does the world have to be where babies can get cancer? I cried a lot when I got back to my room. I feel like I might cry again now from writing about it. Babies shouldn’t have cancer. 

I’m not sure what else to write about, and I’m getting really tired. More tired than I was when I started writing anyway. I don’t know if this helped any. I think when I get up in the morning, I’ll try texting Tsukki back. I might try texting the group chat too, but I’ll start with Tsukki. I’m just scared. I know I can’t avoid them forever. I don’t want to bring them down. I don't want to be a burden to them. I’d avoid my own thoughts if I could- I’ve definitely tried. I just want to get this over with.

Fuck cancer.

**Author's Note:**

> This is loosely inspired by Obsidian_Rose's The Poison He Tried to Keep Secret, but is not related to the story.
> 
> I haven't written anything in nearly a decade, but I hope this wave of inspiration continues. Thanks for reading :)


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